


The Road Goat

by OrganizedDecay



Category: Original Work
Genre: Coming of Age, Driving, Gen, Goats, Self-Discovery, Short, Surreal, dangerous driving, dont try this at home kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 23:57:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20497511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrganizedDecay/pseuds/OrganizedDecay
Summary: A road trip fiction with a side of self discovery and many, many goat-themed songs. Originally posted as a wildly-out-of-hand twitter thread.





	The Road Goat

"I dunno," X mumbles, the uncertainty in her voice as obvious as a grasshopper you see on your brightly lit screen at 3am on a humid August night. "I'm always scared when in driver's seat. I mean, what if we get hit?"

We stand in front of my grandfather’s car, a vehicle that remembers the times of old Eastern Bloc and that seems to have been born already old without ever experiencing the joys of childhood, a similarity which became the very basis of the relationship between the two of us. It has a bumper sticker on the back window with a cartoon infant smiling at anyone looking at it. In red letters a menacing print announces to the world that there is “baby on board”.

I look at X in all of her 5 feet tall glory (nearly 3 inches of which are thanks to her wild curls, which I always decided safest not to point out), who looks like an exceptionally bored elementary schooler. I think: _baby, indeed._

I nod sagely, because my blown up Capricorn ego won't allow me for a regular nod. "It's ok, I can sit there instead," I say, with some level of condescending, though not enough to alarm X, a skill that I’ve managed to master throughout past 20 years of being a Capricorn.

X looks at me weird. "But you can't drive?"

"It's okay," I repeat. "We will be fine, I tried for a bike license once.”

I don’t mention that I didn’t pass, but it’s a minor detail anyway.

We enter the car - an old, red fiat 180p, passed through two generations of Novak’s between various uncles and cousins in what is probably the saddest game of inter-family hot potato known in so far recorded history.

I go to the driver's seat, X seats in the back. There's wires tied to the wheel which she holds in her hands that are clad in hot pink fingerless gloves. There's a third wire tied to the gear stick and connected to her leg. The pedals are my one and only domain and there's letters written on the gum of my shoes with glittery blue and red gel pens so I know which one to press at any given moment. It took us all of ten minutes to construct this weird mechanical puppet and we test it for all of 30 seconds before we get bored, deem it good enough and decide to go.

I start the car. It takes me three tries but the rumble of the engine once I manage to turn it on is more gratifying than eating a whole sub sandwich without spilling the excess lettuce on the floor. Internally, I triumph. My hands rest lightly on the steering wheel to avoid suspicion, but it's X that leads us out of the driveway and onto the road.

The first half hour goes without a hitch. I honk at a truck while waiting for the green light on the crossing to the beat of _Everybody backstreet's back__,_ but the light changes to green just as the driver leaves his vehicle with clear intentions to beat me up. Or congratulate me on my sense of rhythm. With his fists.

As we leave the crossing I cheer at my luck, though there is some disappointment mixed into it. The prospect of a fistfight on a busy street has always been something that appealed to me and filled me with childlike excitement ever since I watched that one _Dexter _episode with _Action Hank _where Dexter grew a beard and started fighting crime with other bearded men, and now I missed my one in a lifetime chance to fulfill my dream; the angry man in a car gets smaller and smaller as we drive further away from the crossing, and me and X continue our journey depressingly fistfight-less.

We leave the town with little issues, as per X’s request I don’t honk at truck drivers or any other drivers for that matter anymore. In addition, nobody so far seems to realize that my hands are merely a prop for our intricate man-steered wire system, that X is the true puppeteer of our little car-shaped circus du soleil, or that I don't even have a bicycle card. We look just like every other pair of young adults if one of them looked more like a preschooler than someone over 20 and if anyone in these parts owned a red fiat 180p. Nobody did.

Elated by the success of our little charade, I think, _wow, we are incredibly lucky._

And this, well. This is the very moment our luck runs out.

As the saying goes, don't praise the day before the sunset.

There's a goat on the road. And as I always say, where's a goat on the road, there's trouble.

Now, one may ask: _how do you know that?_

Well, I’ve already mentioned before that I'm a Capricorn. While to the uneducated it probably means nothing, to the one well-versed in the ways of the stars will recognize that as a Capricorn, aside from being insufferably pretentious and emotionally unavailable, I know goats. And I know that goats bring trouble.

My hands twitch on the steering wheel and sweat starts dropping down my neck and forehead in thick beads. I look at the goat. The goat looks back, its intense, green eyes seemingly looking straight into my very soul.

It stands far ahead of us at where the road drops down and hides behind the horizon. It's backlit in golds and pinks from the late, afternoon sun, seemingly glowing and ethereal, like a four-hooved god of doom. Like Bacchus on wine withdrawal about to start a party except the main course wasn’t _Dom Perignon_ year 1932 and a roast but you.

"Dodge," I say, a sort of primal fear making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

"From what," asks X, who relaxed during our ride and now looks very much at home holding the wires in her hands, like an 18th century charioteer from London if they dressed in yellow t-shirts and pink corduroy overall dresses back in the day.

"There's a goat on the road," I say, hurriedly though to a regular listener not well-versed in the way of Capricorns it may sound bored and nasal. "We need to dodge."

X sways to the side to see the front window. I can see her brows furrow from the front mirror. "I don't see any goat," she says as we near said goat at the speed of 40 miles per hour.

"Please," I say, just about begging, "just swerve to the right. There's no one else on the road, indulge me.

She does, though not without throwing me a Look that highly suggests that I am at best an idiot and at worst an utter buffoon. She’s mastered the expression over the course of our nearly ten years long friendship nearly to perfection, though deep down I know this is nowhere near the limit of her abilities.

We swerve to the right, a surprisingly swift motion for a car that can be both destroyed and fixed with one kick, and I never stray my eyes from the goat, not even for a second. And yet.

And yet, I fight the urge to cry as I realize that somehow the goat transported to the other lane, seamlessly, as if it’s always been there.

I convince X to swerve once more, saying that I want to test her driving skills. She takes up the challenge with a smile and I welcome the shaking of our car with the closes thing to relief one can feel when trapped in a Fiat 180p with X as a driver.

We do it a couple of times until X gets fed up and tells me to put on some music if I'm so bored. Miraculously, our car stays intact and I send a small prayer to whoever is watching us over int he clouds before with trembling hand I turn on the radio.

"_A rich man's war in poor man's blood, silent their cries..._" plays Killing Joke, the harsh sound of electric guitars abusing my ears with the rage of thirty to fifty wild boars chasing children in someone’s backyard. "._..follow behind the Judas goat._" 

I change the station.

The goat is still in front of us but the distance doesn't change. We pass through another town, listen through_ Goat_ by the Shudder To Think, to Goat 2.0 by Eric Bellinger, _Goat Annie_ by Carole King and several others as I keep hopping through the stations in a wild fury worthy of a middle aged man sat in front of his TV trying to find something that isn’t Mango or morning weather forecast at five am on a Sunday. The goat remains ever present and I slowly assign what portion of my sanity be assignable.

"What are the five apex predators of the jungle," asks X out of nowhere as we listen to Evil Little Goat by Pearl Jam, about an hour after I spotted The Four Hooves of Doom.

"Goats," I say, because I'm at the point in my life where I acknowledge that goats run the world and I don't question it.

"No," X says, because she knows nothing. I indulge her anyway.

"What's the answer then," I ask.

"Three lions and two tigers," she says like it’s the most hilarious joke she’s ever heard. I stare at the goat at the end of the road and she looks back with eyes that know what hides at the bottom of the ocean.

"Okay," I agree with barely concealed pity, for X doesn't know yet.

My staring contest with the goat lasts through next string of goat related songs which keep pouring through the tinny radio speakers no matter how often I change the station. At some point I stop focusing on them and drift away, my eyes stuck in the horizontal irises of the god. _Goat_.

I fall into a kind of trans where I both seat and don’t seat in the car, my consciousness drifts far beyond the old, leather seat of the Fiat 180, beyond my body, beyond where human consciousness should drift, allowing me to see a trillion years into the past and into the future as I transform from a human into a bug into water into mist into a celestial body only for the black hole to swallow me like a child would corn candy on a Halloween night - with tearful, lip-trembling disappointment and an aching tooth.

When I wake up from the vision, I feel both like a newborn and a being too old to describe with words, my bones singing to the eons past and my blood reaching to the eons that are still yet to come.

I am bathed in the golden pink light of the late afternoon sun. There is a black, gravel road stretching behind me and before me, seemingly endless though I know it stops abruptly three meters into an overgrown cornfield at the end of the universe somewhere in the middle-of-nowhere Minnesota. A small, red car is speeding straight at me but I am secure in the knowledge that it won't ever be able to hit me. I remain fixed in place, unbothered and inevitable

I stare into the car, past the plastic glass and dangling, yellow car freshener at myself, sitting in the front seat, pretending to drive with X sitting behind me and holding the wires. I am dressed in an old Batman t-shirt and torn jeans and look immensely bored though I’m paralyzed with fear.

My body stares back at me, eyes droopy and tired though irises thin with panic, and at that moment I finally understand.

I was the goat the entire time.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote it very spontaneously on twitter with the intention of making maybe a three-post long thread but it got wildly out of hand and, well, here we are.


End file.
